The good news: Aliens Versus Predator is coming back, and under the auspices of Rebellion, the studio behind the fantastic 1999 original game. The bad news: Sega is publishing. The company hasn’t been able to do much right of late, whether you’re talking about continuing to hump the dead corpse of Sonic the Hedgehog or failing in the seemingly simple task of making a decent Iron Man game. When the new House of the Dead title is your company’s recent big success…well, I guess there’s always room to revamp old games for portables.
Anyway.
While the movies have stunk like kimchi left out in the sun, the Aliens Versus Predator games were pretty damn good. They had distinct classes in the human, predator and alien roles, with very significant gameplay differences between each. The first game was bloody difficult, but if you could get a handle on controlling the fast and eggshell-weak aliens, not much else in the FPS arena was more fun. Creatures shoved into current games still remind me of playing the alien in these games, which is a testament to how specific they were.
(And I want to stress that I’m talking about the 1999 PC title published by Fox Interactive and the 2001 sequel developed by Monolith and released by Sierra, not any of the various other games with similar titles.)
The new game is planned for 2010 and will have some effect on the scheduling of other Sega Aliens titles, but that’s all the press release has to say. More details soonish, and hopefully we’ll get to play this bastard at E3.